The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 and it ultimately answered two questions:
- Whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government.
- Whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with an equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world.
Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first Republican president in 1860 and he won on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories. Seven slave states then seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. President Lincoln’s administration and most of the people in the north, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the secession. They were concerned that it would discredit democracy and would eventually break the United States up into several small countries.
The event that started the Civil War was when the Confederate Army opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861. The soldiers at the fort were forced to lower the American flag in surrender. Lincoln called on the militia to suppress this “insurrection”. It was at this time that four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy. By the end of 1861, more than a million men were fighting.
Over 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died during the four years of combat and much of the South’s infrastructure was destroyed.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant. The war ended with the capture of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, on May 10, 1865.
With Lincoln’s leadership and the efforts of the Union Army, we remained an indivisible nation with a sovereign government and slavery was abolished.
